Unbecoming (40 page)

At one point, he took her hand in his, and she was so shocked at the feel of his skin that she stumbled forward, half-witted with lust and disbelief.

Neither of them spoke of his leaving, and when they got home and he went to the bathroom, she thought this was it, that now he would pack up and leave to make the last Sunday train. But he did not go and instead ran his hands up the backs of her thighs, under her skirt. He pressed his nose into her belly and slid his fingers behind her underwear, moaning when he felt how slick she was.
I have been waiting for you
, she wanted to tell him,
knowing you would never come
. She pushed him down on the ancient flowered couch and told him that she didn’t want him to leave, she never wanted him to leave, every way she knew how to.

You still haven’t learned any other way to get what you want
, she thought, but she pushed the thought away. All she wanted was him, and all she could do was give—show him how badly she loved him and hope to make him want her even half as much in return.

 • • • 

Afterward they sat at the table, radiant and profane, and Grace fed him greengage plums and buttered toast and wine. Alls didn’t talk and so neither did she. She didn’t want to disrupt whatever fragile balance was keeping him in the chair across from her.

“Someone will search your house,” he said.

She pushed the crumbs on her plate into a line. “She can’t call the police.”

“Then someone else, someone worse. It won’t be nice.”

“She’s going to think it was Hanna,” she said.

“I don’t know your boss, I don’t know what kind of people she’s with, but you can’t stay here.” He rubbed his eyes. “I thought I’d leave your life in shambles,” he said. “I planned on it. But not like this. Where can you go?”

She shrugged, trying to swallow her dismay. “Anywhere,” she said. “Anywhere I haven’t been yet.”

“This isn’t how I thought it would be,” he said.

She waited. She didn’t know what he meant yet.

“I thought you would have figured it all out now,” he said. “I thought you’d be telling redneck jokes for Europeans at dinner parties. I thought you’d be a well-dressed alcoholic. I thought you’d have just what you wanted and then I’d come and take it from you.” He laughed sadly. “I thought you’d be the collateral damage—some revenge on the side—on my way to get what
I
wanted.”

“What do you want?”

“Fuck if I know. I never did.”

“I knew,” she said. “I wanted you.”

“I wish I believed you.”

No, she’d misheard him.
I wish
I’d
believed you
, he’d said.

“Then,” she said, making sure.

He nodded.

“I do too,” she said.

“You haven’t destroyed anything,” she said. “I needed to leave here anyway. This isn’t any life I wanted either, and I think you know that now, right?”

He sighed, almost imperceptibly, and she felt an opening.

“Let’s go together,” she said. “This time. I know you can’t love me, not like you did. I can do jewelry, swap out the stones, I can—”

He was shaking his head. “No fakes. We’d be caught in a week.”

“Precious for precious,” she said. He was listening. “Nothing fake. But if you switch amethysts for emeralds and put in a diamond where there used to be a topaz—everything would check out with any jeweler. We could steal and sell for years and years, and nothing could be traced, as long as I changed enough. I could do that,” she told him. “I’d be good.”

He laid his head on the table.

“We’ll sell the trillions to get started,” she said. “To buy stones for these pieces from the safe. And then we’ll use the stones I pull from these in the next pieces. Not all at once, there are sizes and shapes and all that to consider, but we could move them a little at a time, as much or as little as we needed. The rocks from bracelet A into necklace B into brooch C into ring D. Nothing would be recognizable, as long as we only use mass jewelry. Nothing one of a kind. Gold, platinum. We’ll go everywhere. I’ll get a job as coat-check girl when we run out, or a maid, and you can sneak in and open their safes. There’s jewelry everywhere,” she said, running out of breath. “The harvest would be endless.”

“You’ve been wrong before.”

“I’m not wrong this time.”

He had closed his eyes hard, shutting her out. Now he lifted his head. “Where is Riley?” he asked.

She hadn’t checked since Alls had come.

31

T
he story was two days old.
NY AUTHORITIES FIND MISSING PAROLEE
, the headline read.

U.S. marshals say they have found a Garland man who left Tennessee while on parole as part of a robbery sentence.

A parole warrant was issued on August 19 for 23-year-old Riley Sullivan Graham, who went missing from his place of employment the day before. Graham was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in a Queens, New York, bar on Tuesday. Upon his arrest, the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force ordered him returned to Tennessee, where he will reappear before the court for sentencing.

Graham had served nearly three years for the robbery of the Josephus Wynne Historic Estate in Garland in 2009.

He had been looking for her. She saw that Alls was reading the page again and then again. She sat down on the bed and crossed her arms tightly. Her throat began to seize.

Everything she touched, she thought.

“I should have told him,” he finally said. “I should have made him hate us both.”

Grace closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at him. “Where did you think he’d gone?”

“I thought he needed to start over as someone else, away from his family.” He shook his head. “I didn’t care what he did.”

She dug her palms into her eyes. “He was looking for me. I knew he would.”

“I thought he was over you. I was the one who wasn’t.”

The air between them was thick and human. She felt drugged. “Don’t you see? I ruined
everyone
. One bad apple. This will never end.”

“Who’s the fucking apple? Don’t
you
see?” he said. “This
is
the end.” He pulled her hands from her eyes. “We have to leave him behind. He has people to take care of him.”

“You don’t get it,” she said. “I’m poor. I mean, I’m poor like this”—she looked around the kitchen—“but I’m
poor
, here.” She thumped her open palm on her chest. “I’m a vacuum, just sucking up everything I can.”

“Take it,” he said. “Give me what you’ve got, and I’ll give you what I’ve got, and that will have to be enough for us.”

 • • • 

They needed cash to travel. Alls had some left from Greg but Grace wanted to pull her own weight. Jacqueline had not paid her regular wages on Friday and she didn’t know what that meant. Alls had been hoping there would be some money in the safe but there had been only jewelry. Grace could have told him that Jacqueline didn’t have any money.

On Monday morning, she put on her best white sheath and a black cardigan over it for work. First she went to Lachaille with the trillions. She didn’t need to be at work right at nine. Jacqueline didn’t even know she had a key—Grace had copied Hanna’s without asking their boss—and this would be a poor time for Jacqueline to realize that she did. Jacqueline wouldn’t come in until ten, and Amaury and Hanna had keys to get in before then, but they were gone. Grace would get there just early enough to wait outside for her boss.

Lachaille’s steel grate was still down, despite that the sign said they opened at nine. Grace walked around the block. If Lachaille didn’t open soon, the day was already shot.

At 9:20 the grate flew up. Grace was watching from the café across the street.

“We don’t buy loose diamonds,” Mme Lachaille said, shaking her head. “And no certificates? No, we don’t do that.”

Grace spread out Alls’s torn page from
Architectural Digest
and pointed to her bracelet. “How much did you get for this? Five times what you paid me?”

The older woman pursed her dark lips. “It was a fair price.”

Grace folded her arms and waited. “I’ve sold you some really beautiful things,” she said. “I didn’t expect that I was—”

“These are not my business. I sell antique jewelry. These need antique jewelry behind them. You’re not going to get a good price anywhere.” She shook her head quickly. “Put some clothes on them,” she hissed.

Grace had expected a lowball offer that the magazine clip would improve; she had not expected to be turned down entirely.

“I can make a call for you,” Mme Lachaille said. “That’s it.”

“Please.”

Mme Lachaille rooted through her address book, grumbling, and then put up a finger. “I have to ask my husband,” she said. “One minute.”

Grace wouldn’t sell the trillions today—an early blow. She’d never sold jewelry anywhere else, and she didn’t have time to try, not if she was going to make it to work before Jacqueline, which she had to because she always did, and this day could not look any different. She needed to be there when Jacqueline discovered she had been robbed so that her accusations would fall on Hanna. And who would Lachaille send her to, anyway? She had no idea. No, it was too risky to improvise.

But Madame had left her address book splayed open on the glass counter, and under it, her blank pad of carbon paper receipts. An invitation. Grace knew her stoned-heiress-abroad act might not work everywhere. She had no certifications, no little slips of paper to legitimize her. Her charm had definite limits. She slipped the pad into her purse and then reached for the address book too. She might need to make some new friends soon.

She left quickly and quietly, stilling the bells that hung from the door in her hand.

On the sidewalk, she flipped open Alls’s phone. He had not called yet, but it was early. He was to go out this morning to buy another phone, and he had given her his to take. He said he would call her as soon as he had it so she could call him when Jacqueline discovered the safe had been emptied. “Just call the number back,” he said. “I won’t answer.” They needed to be ready to go, in case Jacqueline or her superiors went for Grace and her apartment instead of Hanna and hers.

Grace feared the call would not come and she would be left holding the bag. That was what she had done to him. But there was nothing to do except wait and see.

 • • • 

At work she pressed the buzzer as she always did, going through the motions but expecting silence. No one answered. Good. She leaned against the brick wall to wait. But then there was a crackle on the intercom, then a buzz, and the front lock clicked open. Damn.

The studio door was propped. Grace didn’t like this, any of it. She pushed open the door and saw Amaury standing there, baggy-eyed and grimacing, as if it were he who had been caught at something.

“My God,” she said. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”

He shook his head slowly, as if he couldn’t believe it himself. “And yet, here I am again. How are things?”

“Fine,” Grace said. “Slow. Very slow.” She dropped her bag on her chair and scratched her ankle. “Hanna’s almost finished with the centerpiece.”

“I saw,” he said. “It looks very nice.”

They stood together, admiring it. Grace had expected the project to take much longer, but Hanna had worked on nothing else. Grace blew into the air and watched the corn stalks flutter. She and Amaury laughed.

“I like the corn,” he said. “And the peaches, the little pits.”

“I did those,” Grace said, knowing he knew that. Carving fruit seemed like ages ago.

Grace squinted toward Hanna’s station.

“What is it?”

“She said she was going to finish the case on Saturday,” she told him. “She mixed some glue before she left on Friday.”

He frowned, but not as if he cared. Grace went to inspect Hanna’s unfinished work.

“And what have you been doing?” he asked. “More jewelry?”

“Just a few things, cleaning and resetting,” she said. “These rich people, knocking their jewelry around and breaking it. I guess if you have a lot of it, it’s less precious.” Too much, she thought. She should have said half that.

He nodded absently.

“It’s really strange that Hanna didn’t come in,” Grace said. “I hope she’s okay.”

Jacqueline came in at 10:20, looking as if she’d spent the weekend drinking on a boat. “Hanna’s not here,” Grace tattled. “And she didn’t finish the case.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? It’s due there at noon!”

The work was well below Hanna’s code, but Grace hustled together the last pieces of the case with a staple gun and twine. She carefully slid the centerpiece into its wide wooden box with Amaury’s help. It was heavy, maybe thirty pounds, and of what? Wool, wire, glass beads, and scraps of fabric.

She knocked on the door to Jacqueline’s office. “Pardon,” she said. “Are you going to pay us today?”

“Yeah,” her boss said absently. “This afternoon.”

“Because my rent is due and—”

“I said today.”

Grace called a taxi, and Amaury helped her get the centerpiece up the stairs. They declined the driver’s help.

“I should go with you,” Amaury said. “To get it out again.”

“Not necessary,” Grace said. “But I should take the gurney. Wait here?”

In the stairwell she opened the phone. Alls still had not called.

 • • • 

Grace let the driver help her slide the box onto the folding cart, and she rolled it into the lobby of the collector’s marble-floored building. She went up in the freight elevator, light-headed with nerves. She would unveil the centerpiece and show it off, and then she would return to work and the spectacle of horrors that would unfold there.

The collector, a man who otherwise looked disappointingly average in a starched white button-up, wore compass cufflinks, their arrows spinning indiscriminately. He breathed deeply, as if he were in the habit of meditating, but crossed and recrossed his arms as she pushed the gurney across the floor. He wanted the centerpiece in a small sitting room behind his library; he said he displayed his folk art there. The centerpiece was hardly folk art, but perhaps the man meant all his funny art, or all his miscellaneous art. She obliged, hearing him suck in his breath as she wheeled around corners. His walls were crowded with oils and tapestries, mostly religious scenes. She told him she would need assistance to move it off the gurney, and he doubled back to murmur into an intercom.